Processes for harvesting potatoes are well known. In a typical commercial practice potatoes are removed from the earth by a mechanized harvester having a plurality of hoppers and conveyors that collect, transport and elevate harvested potatoes to an elevated terminal discharge end of a final conveyor, the final conveyor frequently being a boom. The potatoes are then dropped from the terminal discharge end and piled into a mechanized transporter, the transporter frequently being a truck having a bed with a conveyor system therein. After being first piled into the truck's bed, potatoes may then be transported to a climate controlled storage or processing site.
Potatoes are typically grown in a series of spaced apart rows and use of wider conveyors on a harvester can accordingly produce greater ease, efficiency and speed in harvesting potatoes. Conversely, however, use of wider conveyors on a mechanized harvester can increase the harvester's width and thereby make the process of transporting the harvester from one harvest site to a next harvest site more difficult, time consuming and expensive. Greater harvester width can even result in a harvester being precluded by law or by physical limitations like, for example, limited road width from using otherwise convenient paths between harvest sites.
Various inventions to reduce the transport dimensions of a harvester during transport have accordingly been proposed. These typically involve complicated assemblies or time consuming means for folding and reorienting conveyors associated with the harvester. Some involve the complicated folding of multiple frame segments of a single conveyor. Some require use of multiple, separate actuators and even additional tools to effectuate the folding and reorientation of even a single conveyor from an operational orientation to a transport orientation. Yet further, many involve reconfiguration of the conveyor in a transport orientation that differs significantly from the conveyor's operation orientation and which can markedly reposition the harvester's center of mass and even affect the harvester's stability.
While various devices particularly from outside the potato processing field include some of the general structural and operational features of the present invention, no previously known device includes the overall structural and functional features of the present invention. These overall structural and functional features promote efficiency, simplicity and ease of operation and allow the present invention to: (1) rapidly and selectively rotate a conveyor around a single axis between a stable operational orientation and a stable transport orientation while simultaneously moving the conveyor rearward along the axis to clear a path for rotation of a hopper from an operational configuration beneath a discharge end of the conveyor to a folded transport configuration; and (2) selectively rotate the conveyor around the single axis between the transport orientation and the operational orientation while simultaneously moving the conveyor forward along the axis to an operational configuration with a discharge end of the conveyor positioned over the hopper.